Lorcan Dempsey points to Peter Murray-Rust’s recent post on Open Data; a topic dear to our collective heart here at Talis.

We’ve been looking for a while at some of the ways that data might be freely, fairly and flexibly licensed, and have previously offered our Community Licence draft to the discussion as one way to appropriately protect the rights of a creator whilst not stifling use, reuse, and innovation by third parties.

Libraries have invested, and continue to invest, significant sums of public money in creating detailed catalogues of information about the items in their care. Some commentators even go so far as to suggest that the data are freely and openly available, forgetting or ignoring the reality that this tends only to be the case within quite tightly defined groups of cooperating libraries, such as those paying through the nose every year to get in and at WorldCat.

Increased visibility of WorldCat via WorldCat.org has been a good thing. It’s also had the (unfortunate?) side effect of illustrating just how many libraries are not represented. Those unrepresented libraries are often physically closer to you than the ones WorldCat suggests, and they may well be far more prepared to grant you access than some of the institutions to which WorldCat refers you. WorldCat is doing the best it can. It isn’t the poor application’s fault that it’s built on a business model that excludes so many. To become a World (or even just national) Catalogue of real value, the model has to change. Let any library contribute their data for free. Let anyone take that data out, for free. Offer more than just a web site and a couple of HTML search boxes. Offer real APIs, and let others draw upon the value that such a catalogue could embody. Fund the service on the back of new opportunities, most of which only arise when you hit a critical mass of coverage that WorldCat is nowhere near today.

Models of data control and exclusivity have had their day, in libraries as in so many other places.

To build meaningful services for users who shouldn’t have to care who their library’s vendor is, or whether or not the library is in WorldCat or any of the alternative ‘union’ catalogues, we need to take a step back and begin thinking and acting in fundamentally different ways.

Lorcan’s right. Open data is important. Critically important.

We have technologies and models that make it possible to move beyond an abstract belief in the rightness of openness. We have those technologies and models within our reach today. Others could have them, too. OCLC could have them too, and make WorldCat what it should be.

So let’s stop locking our data in ludicrously expensive silos, where only subsets of the library community can gain value from them, and let’s do the right thing. Let’s open up our catalogue records to use and reuse by anyone prepared to sign up to principles such as those in the TCL. Let libraries share the data. Let third parties such as LibraryThing share in the data. Let the data out, and see what happens.

You won’t regret it.

Tim Bray encapsulates what open data should mean nicely, when he writes;

“Any data that you give us, we’ll let you take away again, without withholding anything, or encoding it in a proprietary format, or claiming any intellectual-property rights whatsoever.”

That sounds reasonable, don’t you think? It’s your data. Don’t let anyone else tell you what you can and cannot do with it. Think about the current model, and at least start to question it. If you question it and find it lacking, come and find us, because we should talk.

Technorati Tags: OCLC, open data, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, TDN, WorldCat

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